08/23/2026
When I was a kid in 1996 I went to my first big jackpot. It was a USTRC affiliate event on July 4th weekend in Monroe, Louisiana. I couldn’t sleep for what felt like weeks leading up to it. I got to rope with my buddy Colby Daughtery who helped me learn to rope. We’d spend almost a year at his house getting it right.
Colby was a few years older and already heeled really good. I thought he was the coolest, so getting a chance to rope with him at a big roping like this was a big deal for me. Especially my first one.
We roped great all day just as planned and had a decent call back in the top 10 to win a check. In the short go my curl came around and hit the steers left shoulder, and I waived it off.
Talk about devastated.
We’d fought to be in that very place all day and just like that I’d let my bud down. I can still remember that feeling today writing this.
You should have a short memory when competing and let it go. I know that today. At the time it took the air of me.
I had failed.
Weeks later our family was at some close friend’s house visiting (kids people used to do this before iPhones ask your parents). Those friends were the Hogans. There weren’t a lot of people in my area that were horsemen at all so the ones I did know I held in high regard. Mr. Jules was one of those guys for me.
He pulled me aside and told me how proud he was of me and how my grandpa would have been proud of me for doing so well in that roping. I dropped my head…I was embarassed. I had to explain to him I’d missed and failed. He shook his head and explained to me there were over 200 teams in that roping and out of all those I made the short round at my first roping. He wasn’t confused at all. He just saw the positive.
That stuck with me.
Sometimes our perceived failure is just that…perceived. We can take the positive away and learn from it…or we can let failure eat you!
If you have the chance to speak life into people. Do it. Build them up, but always be honest about it. What you say has power and it might just stick with a kid decades later and shape the way he views life.
Thank you Mr. Jule, we sure do miss ya down here.